Kelly McParland: In Obama versus the warmongers, Obama is the better bet

In Obama versus the warmongers, Obama is the better bet

Sen. John McCain was in full cry the other day, lecturing Leon Panetta, the U.S. defence secretary, on the lack of “leadership” being exhibited on the issue of Syria. Panetta had just finished explaining to a Senate armed services committee that the Obama administration recognized that armed intervention might become necessary, and was preparing for it, but preferred to keep “focusing on diplomatic and political approaches rather than a military intervention.”

You could see McCain getting agitated. “Let me tell you what’s wrong with your statement,” he said.“You don’t mention American leadership. Americans should lead in this, America should be standing up. America should be building coalitions, we shouldn’t have statements like we are not going to intervene no matter what the situation is, such has been up until now the statements by the administration and the president.”

“…in past experiences, those that I mentioned before, America has led. Yes, it has been multilateral and multinational, this is absolutely vital. We’re not leading Mr. Secretary.”

Panetta had already made clear that the White House was trying to coordinate its response with its allies, because you don’t just go marching into Syria and smacking around Bashar al Assad without mentioning it to the rest of Europe or the Middle East, so that part of McCain’s lecture made no sense. What he clearly wanted were some bombs falling on Damascus. “Leading” to McCain means bombing the crap out of dictators, like in Iraq and Libya, and maybe Afghanistan too, though that was more about terrorism. It doesn’t mean pussyfooting around with diplomacy.

Columnist Charles Krauthammer, who really doesn’t have much time for Obama, has similar feelings regarding the administration’s Iran policy. Benjamin Netanyahu had been in Washington this week, looking for a sign the U.S. would accept an Israeli attack on Iran, and asking for bunker-buster bombs that could improve its hopes of disabling Iran’s underground nuclear sites. Obama offered the bombs, but on the condition Israel wait a year before attacking.

“Revealing and shocking,” Krauthammer wrote of the decision. Why was the U.S. holding Israel back? “The world’s greatest exporter of terror (according to the State Department), the systematic killer of Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, the self-declared enemy that invented “Death to America Day” is approaching nuclear capability — and the focus of U.S. policy is to prevent a democratic ally threatened with annihilation from pre-empting the threat?” He concluded it was all about re-election: the president just wanted to protect his backside until after the election in November.

How easy it is to throw around lives when you’re not actually in power (as McCain, remember, might have been if he’d beaten Obama in 2008). Just rain down some bombs on the bad guys. It will all work out, the U.S. knows how to handle military matters. Just look at the record.

Like Iraq — because that worked out so well? Or Afghanistan? In both those cases the U.S. was up against enemies with much less firepower than Syria and Iran could muster. (Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, pointed out that Syria has five times the air defences Libya had, covering a fifth the terrain). And neither Iraq or Afghanistan had the ability to cripple an already wounded world economy by shutting off the energy flow.

So let’s say Israel attacks Iran. There are plenty of analysts who say it might not make any difference: Tehran has clearly prepared for that possibility and might be capable of continuing its nuclear program nonetheless. Forget about Israel’s supposed military invincibility, that myth has been several times disproven. The only near-certainty from an Israeli assault would be a regional firestorm with incalculable results, Arab versus Jew, Islam versus the West, inevitably drawing the U.S. into a cauldron of hate with a very high potential for economic and human devastation.

That’s leadership? Insanity, more like. Panetta tried to explain that, as defence secretary, he has a duty to be “very sure that we know what the mission is. I’ve got to make very sure that we know whether we can achieve that mission, what price and whether or not it will make matters better or worse. ”

One of the main reasons given for the disaster that developed after the U.S. had defeated Iraq’s army was the very lack of that sort of preparation. The Bush administration didn’t bother making plans for what to do next, figuring Iraqis would be so overwhelmingly grateful for the elimination of Saddam Hussein that it would all just work itself out. So it made a series of horrific blunders that extended the violence and resulted in thousands of dead troops and maybe hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians.

And Afghanistan? What was the exit strategy there? Kill Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden and get out? Great — except it took a decade to find bin Laden, and Mullah Omar is still out there somewhere. Meanwhile, the West’s great strategic pal, Hamid Karzai, has just endorsed an edict formally relegating Afghan women to second-class status, in hopes it will ease the way to talks with the same Taliban that NATO’s lost lives were supposed to eliminate.

The lesson in every recent military venture the U.S. has engaged in has been to know your enemy, plan beyond the initial attack, establish a clear and achievable goal, designate an exit strategy beforehand, and co-ordinate as much as possible with allies to ensure there is broad international political and military support. The alternative — attacking first, making it up as you go along, and worrying about the consequences later — produces the kind of decade-long agony the U.S. is only now extricating itself from.

None of these lessons appear to have imprinted themselves on Republican thinking. Mitt Romney, the likely Republican nominee, blithely promises that if he’s elected, Iran will not succeed in obtaining a nuclear bomb. His strategy — heightened sanctions, tighten the diplomatic screws, keep U.S. naval forces nearby, confer with allies and keep the option of military action open — is identical to Obama’s, but with greater emphasis on sabre-rattling: “My foreign policy plan to avert this catastrophe is plain: Either the ayatollahs will get the message, or they will learn some very painful lessons about the meaning of American resolve,” he declares. No wonder Obama feels the need to warn his opponents that bluster doesn’t win wars.

“This is not a game, and there’s nothing casual about it,” he said. “When I see the casualness with which some of these folks talk about war, I’m reminded of the costs involved in war.”

You won’t catch Obama in a flak jacket, strutting around the deck of an aircraft carrier boasting “Mission accomplished.” Maybe if that president had taken war more seriously there would have been less of it, and many fewer casualties. For all Obama’s domestic troubles, his overseas effectiveness has been notable, removing the U.S. from messes left behind by the Republicans, finally eliminating bin Laden, reducing the count of active terrorists while risking far fewer military lives, joining in the ousting of Muammar Gaddafi without turning it into an all-American extravaganza, and resisting the temptation to portray the U.S. as the all-powerful global policeman, which it isn’t. Given a choice between Obama, or McCain, Romney or any of the other Republican chest-beaters, I’d say Obama’s are the safer pair of hands.